The Congress-left alliance that the West Bengal Chief Minister had once contemptuously dismissed as being no match for the Trinamool Congress, is now being looked upon as a serious contender for power
West Bengal’s 2016 State Assembly election has already sprung quite a few surprises and is almost sure to throw up more when the result is out on May 19. Current voting trends indicate that there could be major electoral upsets, which very few can now predict. But the most visible surprise is that the once over-confident and over-buoyant Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee, who not long ago, had boasted of staging a far more impressive victory than that of 2011, is now squirming because of startling revelations in theNarada bribery and flyover collapse scams that threaten to bring the TMC chickens home to roost.
The Congress-left alliance that she had once contemptuously dismissed as being no match for her TMC, is now being looked upon as a serious contender for power. Even the organisationally weak BJP, which never figured in her poll reckoning, is now being viewed as no pushover as it has already made its presence felt in this election. As a result, she has implored voters not to withdraw their continued support to her party despite its many mistakes.
For a sitting Chief Minister, who is also the head of a ruling party, to tell voters to “come and slap me but for god’s sake don’t stigmatise me as achor (thief)”, betrays her nervousness about the impact that theNarada scam would have on the poll outcome. Her supporters say that this was her preventive strategy to stop the scam from casting any shadow on her poll prospects in her home turf Bhowanipore, where, going by figures of the last lok Sabha poll, her party was trailing the BJP.
More than the Narada scam, what may impact more adversely on the TMC’s poll result will be corruption — a malaise which went viral among party leaders when they came to power. Five years ago, many among them were unsure wherefrom would their next meal come. Today they own palatial bungalows and fleets of luxury cars and buses. In this election, the TMC has fielded the highest number of crorepati candidates, many of whose moveable and immovable assets have risen manifold over the last five years.
luck also seems to have run out for Banerjee as she, in the last one and a half months, has been beset with such a quick succession of political misfortunes that she is unable to cope with them.Narada was followed by the release of a morphed video released with the clear intent of denigrating Prime Minister Narendra Modi. As a result, cases under the Cyber Crime Act and of criminal defamation have been filed against Trinamool leaders, which have the potential to snowball and severely compromise her image further. Just when the video issue was showing signs of ebbing, her storm-troopers beat up two four year-old children belonging to the Opposition families. The crime of one of the children was that her father was a CPI(M) polling agent. These incidents unleashed such a popular outrage that the local Trinamool MP, Dinesh Trivedi, was forced to come out in defence of the child victim and condemn his party goons for their criminal act.
Actually, Mamata Banerjee is herself to blame for bringing her party to such a messy pass. When the Narada scam first surfaced, she dismissed the sting operation as a “doctored and fake video and a political conspiracy” aimed at maligning her and her party. Subsequently, she took the plea that the money taken was not bribe but ‘donation’ to meet the party’s poll expenses. Sensing that this stand was not convincing voters and her image was getting sullied, she did a complete somersault saying that “had the scandal surfaced ahead of TMC’s finalisation of nomination list and last date of filing of nomination, I would have denied party tickets to scam-tainted leaders”. But this was a ruse to distance herself from the tainted leaders
When all her attempts to prove herself and scam tainted leaders innocent failed, she broke down saying, “Don’t vote for me if I am a chor”. Her ever-shifting and conflicting stance made people realise that she was desperately trying to hide the truth.
That she is her own undoing has been proved once again by her latest act of foolhardiness by getting a Modi video of 2013 vintage morphed. In the said video, Rajnath Singh is seen offering sweets to Modi, whose image had been replaced by Prakash Karat’s. This was done with the malicious intent to mislead Muslim voters into believing how close the relationship between the Marxist-led Congress alliance and the BJP was. The strategy boomeranged so badly that both the CPI(M) and the BJP have filed criminal cases against TMC leaders.
No sooner had the dust of this political imbroglio started settling down, came the brutal attack on the two four-year old children belonging to opposition party families, followed by messy cover-up bids. The local TMC goons forced the father of one of the victims to give a written undertaking that the ruling partymen were in no way responsible for the incident. He was compelled to write that the child was a victim of domestic violence. But the local Trinamool MP, Dinesh Trivedi, called the bluff, saying the child was a victim of political vendetta and the guilty should be punished. The cumulative impact of these three negative episodes caused Mamata Banerjee a total loss of face.
How swiftly and silently the mood of the State’s voters is shifting from the TMC is best illustrated by the stony silence with which she was greeted by Singur farmers at a recent rally. Once they were in the vanguard of her 2011 ‘oust CPI(M) from power movement’. Singur was the epicentre of her movement to banish the Marxists from Bengal. Today, Singur farmers are blaming her for ruining the village economically and socially. They are demanding the return of the Tata factory to Singur.
The most redeeming feature of this poll is that, despite total hostility from the State Chief Minister, the Election Commission of India could fulfil its constitutional obligation and mandate by holding a by and large free and fair election. It was not until the fourth of the seven-phase Assembly poll that the poll panel could get its act together and exercise control over the election machinery. The first three phases had been marred by reports of irregularities.